Associated University Presses
Resurrecting Elizabeth I in seventeenth-century England.
Sixteen academics from the US, Canada, and UK contribute 15 essays examining how and why written images of Elizabeth Tudor appeared so widely in manuscripts and printed texts during the century following her death, and how those images were modified as the century progressed. Topics explored include quotations and misquotations of Elizabeth's own words; the Phoenix Queen and her successor, James I; the rebirth of Elizabeth in her goddaughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia; forgetting Elizabeth in Henry VIII; the "heroic Elizabeth" vision of Dutch scholar Anna Maria van Schurman and the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet; John Banks' revision of Shakespeare's Elizabeth; an account of Elizabeth's last two years; a psychoanalytical reading of Jonson's early masques; rewriting Elizabeth's execution of Mary Stuart; and 17th-century musical images of the Queen. For historians, literary scholars, musicologists, and women's studies scholars. Distributed in the U.S. by Associated U. Presses. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
A revolution almost beyond expression; Jane Austen's Persuasion.
Harris (emeritus English, U. of Otago, New Zealand) challenges the view from the middle 20th century that British writer Austen (1775-1817), being a woman and of little education, was limited in her capacity, and wrote novels mainly as an escape from too much reality. Harris uses contextual and intertextual reference mainly from her last published novel to demonstrate that Austin was not only deeply engaged in the world around her, but commented on it in her writing. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The sacrament and other plays of forbidden love.
Of the three plays by 20th-century Dutch playwright Claus presented here, Bride in the Morning and Sugar are conventional and naturalistic, dealing with forbidden love by depicting characters sliding around the edges and coming to terms with it. The Sacrament, however, drops articulate and articulated utterances to focus on a powerful subtext underneath a comic surface, wherein characters struggle to avoid articulating their deepest issues. Willinger (theater and speech, City College of New York) has translated Claus previously along with six volumes of Belgian plays. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The staging of romance in late Shakespeare; text and theatrical technique.
Taking The Winter's Tale as his main case study, Cobb (English, Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana) shows how human transformations can take place in and through the performance of romance plays. He focuses on human changes in interactions between a performer and the audience or another character, and on relations between these moments of change and the surrounding action within the drama. The study was his doctoral dissertation at Yale University in a previous incarnation. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Sustaining literature; essays on literature, history, and culture, 1500-1800, commemorating the life and work of Simon Varey.
Scholars of English literature, all American but for one Britain, present five essays on their late colleague Varey, and another 13 on how literature intersected with history and culture over the three centuries. Their topics include Dryden's Alexander's Feast, economics in the work of Hannah More, and anatomy and rhetoric in the early 18th century. Only names are indexed. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The talk of the town; figurative publics in eighteenth-century Britain.
One crucial element in developing a republican government is imagining a public engaged in rational political discussion, says Dean (English, U. of Southern Maine). She argues that in 18th-century Britain, the public sphere was a figure of speech created by juxtaposing images of gatherings at court, in coffeehouses, and in Parliament — all arenas not in fact accessible to the general public. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Writers reading writers; intertextual studies in medieval and early modern literature in honor of Robert Hollander.
Princeton professor Robert Hollander made his reputation as a scholar of Dante and Boccaccio. However, in this collection of 11 literary studies essays, put together by Smarr (theatre and Italian studies, U. of California at San Diego) in his honor, former students of Hollander's do not limit themselves solely to examination of Dante and Boccaccio, but they do adopt Hollander's signature focus on intertextual studies, or the exploration of writers' adoption and cooptation of other writers. The essays are organized into two sections, the first of which explores the uses of the Greek romances, Virgil, Ovid, and the Bible by Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and the second of which explores more modern writers, such as Carlo Maria Maggi and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and their uses of Dante, Boccaccio, and others. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
